The Smith family: growing with the EIP and CEP

As the Lucy Daniels Center celebrates its 20th year of service to the children of the Triangle, staff and parents who were there in the beginning are taking a look back at the journey that has made it the area’s largest and most comprehensive non-profit provider of mental health services for children. It all started in 1991, when the Lucy Daniels Preschool opened with four students who were facing challenges including depression. aggression, and anxiety.

The idea behind the preschool, Center co-founder and clinical/executive director Donald Rosenblitt, M.D., explains, was to apply the understandings gleaned from the psychoanalytic model to how children develop emotionally and help those who are struggling “access their greatest potential and spirit.”

Teri Smith of Cary recalls that her son, Eric, now 24, had struggled to handle emotions such as frustration and jealousy in peer interactions at his earlier preschools. “He wasn’t a mean child, but he responded to [those feelings] by just charging into the situation” and behaving aggressively, she explains. “His teachers just didn’t know how to deal with that.”

“I was willing to acknowledge his issues,” she adds, “but no one could tell me what they were—they just complained about his behavior. Once we were at the Lucy Daniels Preschool, we got helpful feedback about his behavior and how to help him. I felt like, ‘Oh, thank goodness, I can breathe again.’”

The Smiths’ story (and those of other families featured in our Testimonials and Connect newsletters) makes it easy to see why the preschool has grown into one of the Triangle’s most trusted resources for parents. At the time, though, no one—not even the school’s founders—could have predicted such success. For one thing, public awareness of childhood mental health challenges was just beginning to dawn.

As Rosenblitt explains, “In those early years, we had the task of helping the community understand who we were and who we helped. I remember the good people from the church in Morrisville watching us carefully as families arrived in the driveway—I suspect, wondering who we were and what we were.”

He adds, “Over the months that followed we came to form a close relationship with them as they realized that our children were like all other children, just with an added struggle.”

By the third year, the Early Intervention Program (EIP), now in its permanent location on Weston Parkway in Cary, had grown to its current size, serving 12-14 children each year. With the addition of the Child Enrichment Program (CEP) that same year, the preschool broadened its scope, using the same principles that guide the EIP to provide social and emotional growth experiences for more typically developing children.

For the Smith family’s two younger children, the CEP was a place where they could grow and thrive as their brother had in the EIP.  Their mother says that knowing that her children’s teachers had access to expert resources in early childhood development and mental health made her “very happy. I had a lot of trust in [the staff] and was glad they were opening up their program to everybody,” Smith says.

By the start of the Center’s second decade, the Lucy Daniels Preschool had become the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood, with an on-site mental health clinic serving 65 children and their families. With the brisk growth of that program and the addition of SecurePath, an in-home therapy program for young children from low-income families, in 2005 and of First Friends, a social skills development program, in 2011, the Center is now serving more than 600 families annually and reaching 30,000 more through community outreach programs such as Lucy’s Book Club—a significant increase from that first handful of families who, as Rosenblitt says, “took a gamble, on faith, on a program that didn’t yet exist.”

For his own part, Rosenblitt says, “I had absolutely no idea that it would be what it is now. The transformation of the Lucy Daniels Preschool into the Lucy Daniels Center—from a small school to a comprehensive community agency with a school at its heart—was a step I never imagined.”

But then he adds, thoughtfully, “If I had been prescient enough to imagine it, it would have been a brilliant conception of what an appropriate—obvious, really—evolution should be for us: to find a way to be more for the community.”